Holy Land or Holy Lands? Palestine and the Catholic West in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance

Abstract

In one passage in his famous account, Friar Felix Faber described how ‘some dull and unprofitable pilgrims’ to Jerusalem in 1480 mocked the excited behaviour of the devout in the courtyard in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, ‘calling them fools, hypocrites and Beghards’. The incident is revealing of the spectrum of reactions provoked by the experience of the Holy Land in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. Here more than anywhere else, tension was generated by the inescapable paradox of Christology, God become man, and the conflicts which it set up between the immanent and the representational, the universal and the elect, the eschatological and the timeless. This occurred, moreover, within a physical setting which constantly reminded the sensitive pilgrim of the difficulty of reconciling the Old and New Dispensations. But the same electrical charge which caused the Holy Land as sacred space to provoke diverse and at times contradictory responses, endowed the Holy Land as idea with a remarkable attraction. There took place a number of different ‘migrations of the holy’, to use John Bossy’s phrase. To a large extent the status of the geographical Holy Land was weakened by these developments, but in at least one respect it was strengthened.